When Sarah Stanley, a senior at Lopez High School, took a class called Current World Problems and Solutions, she had to choose a topic and make a presentation to her peers. She chose to research the crisis in Darfur, located in the western region of Sudan.

In her own words, Stanley describes how this class made an impact on her and eventually led to a benefit concert.

“The reason I chose this topic was because when I was a freshman in high school my art teacher had me research and study about Darfur. I had no idea about the region, but then I learned that it is now one of the most horrible humanitarian crisis’ that has ever happened.

Knowing this made me want to study the issue more and try to help the people of Darfur.

I couldn’t do anything much when I was younger, but now that I am a senior I thought I could make more of an impact and spread more awareness to our small community. My friend did her project on sex trafficking, which is also a well known problem today.

When my project was finished and I did my PowerPoint to the class both my friend and I thought that spreading awareness to the class was not enough. That is when we decided to go out of our comfort zone and do something that both our topics will benefit from.

That’s exactly what we did; we planned a benefit concert and called it ‘Saving Lives Benefit Concert’ it consisted five hours of non stop music playing by local bands from our island as well as our special guest Common Market who is a hip hop artist from Seattle, Wash.

We had a live auction with cakes and donated prizes. We also had a silent auction that was full of donated prizes such as gift certificates and fudge.

It took McLeod Paton and I all day on Dec. 16 to set up and get everything together. In the end we made $1,600 which we couldn’t have raised if it wasn’t for all the people who supported us and came to watch the show. We split the money in half so the amount you get is half of $1,600.

I hope that you can take this money and give it to all the families, children, woman, and men in the terrible genocide and refugee camps over in Darfur. All I want is to help and show them that there are people out there who care for them and want to help them.

I’m hoping that in the future I can do some more events like this to raise more money and keep helping Darfur out. I wish for this genocide to stop soon and pray for all the families out there.

I want to thank you for being an organization that will help me achieve this goal and help me help the families there.”

For more info on Lopez school curriculum visit www.lopezislandschool.org. For more information on Darfur, visit www.unicef.org/infobycountry/sudan_darfuroverview.html.